Some of my favorite album artwork and other things I found in my pictures.

United States of Secrets Part 2

In my estimation… I think this is the most important documentary of the last 10 years. Thank you PBS and Frontline for having the courage to make this. Part 2 talks about how various Internet companies are complicit in aiding the NSA in its dragnet program. Very scary. We have no privacy left. If you think you do… and live anywhere in the US you are in denial.

I was going to do something different and most likely will anyhow. I thought this was so alarming I should post my thoughts as well as the article. The single best thing that ever happened to intelligence agencies was the cell phone. Your phone constantly gives up its location to satellites even if your not using it… Many cases it does so when it is not on. It is alarming to say the least the Govt is collecting millions if not billions of innocent Americans data as well as anyone else “incidentally”.

Not only is the NSA collecting all of your metadata. Who you call ••for how long ••and how often it now can track your movements as easily as just intercepting the data.

It should not be overlooked the NSA has routinely ignored the law and what the FISA court actually allowed it to do. In fact the FISA court found one progr the NSA ran was outside the law during its entire existence and at no time did they make any effort to comply with the law or Constitution. There is no evidence whatsoever that this entire five eye partnership and dragnet has stopped so much as one terrorist attack. The NSA simply lied about it when the news first was leaked.

Washington Post article

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

(Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and ‘develop’ targets)

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.

Guess I will be back to do my Enhanced Interrogation information tomorrow. Be safe. It’s ok to leave your phone at home. I promise you can survive. Back up the numbers you need at keep somewhere you can access.

Bonus Interesting Cartography

I think Maps are beautiful and most certainly are artwork. A few of these are Game of Thrones maps. I have never read or seen the movie/book. Maps are gorgeous however.

Editor of Guardian called in front of House of Commons to answer for Snowden Leaks

This is at the very center and the main issue of freedom of press. A free Country must have a press that has the freedom and ability to investigate even the most controversial subject matter free of any interference. It is expressly written into the US Constitution and is at the heart of any Democratic Society.

Despite all the political blustering that has surrounded Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s meeting with the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee this week, the real story in the Snowden affair is cryptography.

In some ways, it seemed as though UK security agency GCHQ had been hit by the notorious CryptoLocker virus. CryptoLocker holds computer users to ransom by encrypting all their files and can cause serious headaches for the victim. Some of the answers given by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger at the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on 3 December paint a picture similar to what happens when the virus strikes.

Rusbridger admitted that David Miranda, the partner of Guardian US columnist Glenn Greenwald, had been carrying some of the Snowden files in encrypted form when he was held under the Terrorism Act in August. But, so far, neither the police nor GCHQ have been able to decrypt them.

So, just like CryptoLocker victims, GCHQ is in possession of some of its own files but cannot get into them, as much as it would like to. The contents of the files won’t be a surprise, but GCHQ would very much like to know what it is that Snowden and the journalists know about its work.

Encryption lay at the heart of some of the most important exchanges during Rusbridger’s hour-long appearance in front of MPs. There were some odd interventions at the start of the session, including committee chairman Keith Vaz’s questioning of Rusbridger over whether or not he loved Britain, but from then on, one issue dominated proceedings. This was the transfer of a copy of the Snowden files by the Guardian to the New York Times.

Rusbridger made it clear that the Guardian had indeed shared its entire collection of Snowden files with its American partner. This had been done for journalistic collaboration, and as a safeguard after the pressure put on the Guardian by the UK government over the project.

These files had not been redacted to remove the names of intelligence staff but had largely been transferred in a way that Rusbridger considered fully secure. He reiterated both these points repeatedly in response to near-identical questions from the Committee. Some of the MPs argued that the Guardian might have committed an offence by transporting secret materials to a foreign country, especially if it had not encrypted them securely.

A cryptographic contradiction

A contradiction remains after Rusbridger’s evidence session relating to cryptography, and it’s one that is crucial when we think about whether or not The Guardian overstepped the mark in the Snowden affair.

When pressed for details of the security arrangements for the Guardian’s Snowden files, Rusbridger was reluctant to provide an on-the-spot answer and offered to provide written details to the committee later.

Just as I made a minute ago but I bet he did so more eloquently and with more intelligence than I was able to provide.

The digital dimension of communications and citizenship has rendered old laws and societal and political values anachronistic. The Guardian is no longer an ex-provincial national print title serving centre-left liberal chattering classes. It is a global multimedia publisher. As such, it no longer needs to answer to an English judiciary that tends to bow to the mantra of “national security without question”. It clearly does not see itself as compelled to give up leaked documents to the state.

Rusbridger has been working with the New York Times on the Snowden affair, and has been defining international public interest in democracy and liberty as he goes. And when he appeared before the committee, he spoke not of Parliament Square in London but of the legacy of the Pentagon Papers case of 1971. He also spoke eloquently about the US First Amendment and blocking prior restraint injunctions on the grounds they would be unconstitutional.

He may just have been transformed into one of the few British media editors who actually gets the First Amendment. Through bitter personal experience, Rusbridger appears to have realised that culturally, socially and politically, the UK is a backward and inferior member of the post-industrialised liberal democracies.

Everything he has described about his experience with GCHQ officials in the Guardian’s basement in July this year confirms this view.

The Guardian editor said he had diligently engaged with the uniquely British process of confidentially checking every article that hinged on a Snowden file, bar the first one, with Air-Vice Marshall Andrew Vallance, Secretary of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee.

The first story revealed GCHQ had been monitoring foreign diplomats at a British G20 summit. It was politically embarrassing and was not D-Notice checked precisely because of the British state’s penchant for prior estate injunction first and judicial questions later.

The state made it clear that it had no interest in debating the ins and outs of press freedom at other points in the affair, such as when it took a chainsaw to The Guardian’s hard discs in a symbolic destruction of copies of the Snowden files. And while Rusbridger saw the files confiscated from David Miranda, partner of Guardian US writer Glenn Greenwald, as excluded confidential journalistic material, the UK government took them to be evidence of crime and detained Miranda under the Terrorism Act.

BONUS: Europa has salt water oceans underneath the Ice that is not only heated in various places but might support life.

The ice shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa is marked by regions of disrupted ice known as chaos terrains that cover up to 40% of the satellite’s surface, most commonly occurring within 40° of the equator1. Concurrence with salt deposits2 implies a coupling between the geologically active ice shell and the underlying liquid water ocean at lower latitudes. Europa’s ocean dynamics have been assumed to adopt a two-dimensional pattern3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, which channels the moon’s internal heat to higher latitudes. Here we present a numerical model of thermal convection in a thin, rotating spherical shell where small-scale convection instead adopts a three-dimensional structure and is more vigorous at lower latitudes. Global-scale currents are organized into three zonal jets and two equatorial Hadley-like circulation cells. We find that these convective motions transmit Europa’s internal heat towards the surface most effectively in equatorial regions, where they can directly influence the thermo-compositional state and structure of the ice shell. We suggest that such heterogeneous heating promotes the formation of chaos features through increased melting of the ice shell and subsequent deposition of marine ice at low latitudes. We conclude that Europa’s ocean dynamics can modulate the exchange of heat and materials between the surface and interior and explain the observed distribution of chaos terrains.

Both logos, side by side. Note the original below, with the curved Blackwater wordmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just as I argued in this post. Blackwater often did jobs the CIA/JSOC were hesitant to do.

“”””””””””But the most noteworthy thing about the largely failed prosecution wasn’t the outcome. It was the tens of thousands of pages of documents—some declassified—that the litigation left in its wake. These documents illuminate Blackwater’s defense strategy—and it’s a fascinating one: To defeat the charges it was facing, Blackwater built a case not only that it worked with the CIA—which was already widely known—but that it was in many ways an extension of the Agency itself.””””””””

“””But according to the documents Blackwater submitted in its defense—as well as an email exchange I had recently with Prince—the contractor’s relationship with the CIA was far deeper than most observers thought. “Blackwater’s work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked,” Prince told me recently, in response to written questions. “In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.”

My map of the day is “The Jerseys” from 1777. Just a few years before I was born. It was taken from Library of Congress Map room. I have other map sources I can use but have really liked the LOC Map room.

I am not sure of the validity of this document. I have provided a second piece of evidence in which there is no doubt it is legitimate. I am not offering my thoughts or consequences (as I see them) until I can think about it further. If true it raises some serious questions. The Job posting is what to me lends some credibility to the idea that something like the first .pdf may be somewhat correct and the rumors right. I am undecided in my view on this for the time being.

“””””””””””July 4, 1861

On April 15, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for the initial raising of 75,000 militia to begin preparations for the upcoming armed conflict between Union and Confederate armies. In the same proclamation, Lincoln called for an extra session of Congress to discuss the war which would meet on July 4, 1861:

“Now, therefore, I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union…I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union…. [and[ deeming that the present condition of public affairs presents an extraordinary occasion, I do hereby, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, convene both Houses of Congress. Senators and Representatives are therefore summoned to assemble at their respective chambers, at twelve o’clock noon, on Thursday, the fourth day of July next, then and there to consider and determine such measures as, in their wisdom, the public safety and interest may seem to demand.”

The purpose of the extra session was for lawmakers to debate raising troops to defend the Union and to appropriate funds for the prosecution of the war. In the summer of 1861, commercial publishers like Charles Magnus updated existing maps with updated phrases such as “Extra Session of Congress Map” to make their maps appear more relevant to the shifting headlines.””””””””””””